http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/23/opinion/23herbert.html?hp
I find Bob Herbert in today's New York Times as a scathingly & refreshingly
damning of Rumsfeld and the whole USA/Iraq enterprise.
I would add that there is probably a good behavioral analogy between what
happened at Enron and what is now going in Iraq - minus the bodies. Ideology
in collapse in both cases. Manipulation of markets producing fake and
inflated returns. Etc.
Waiting for the collective rage to come forth in this country? I am not
optimistic.
Stephen V
> I truly don't remember the exchange. What I'd say now is that the invasion
> and its aftermath seems not to have been thought through by anyone with the
> intelligence of a pea. It should have been obvious that all manner of awful
> consequences were possible, some of which we learn about daily. Perhaps the
> least of them is that the United States and Britain are now revealed as
> sanctioning and at least on occasion practicing torture. As to the Kurds,
> this moment is just that, a moment; if there's ever a next election we can
> expect to see their parliamentary representation significantly reduced by
> Sunni participation in the vote, and with it the number of Kurdish
> departmental portfolios. The sequelae of that, with the continuing
> hostility of Iran and Turkey, won't be known until the US decides it's no
> longer cost effective to use the Kurds as a private army and supply them
> accordingly. Which is to say that at some point the Kurds will be orphans
> again, unless it suits another power to enlist them as clients.
>
> We're not particularly good at thinking ahead in the US.
>
> Mark
>
>
> At 01:03 PM 5/23/2005, you wrote:
>> Doug:
>>
>> I haven't really been following these exchanges, but several of your points
>> seem correct. For example:
>>
>> <snip>
>> First I wonder just who this 'left' comprises.
>> <snip>
>>
>> The internal opposition was, inevitably, difficult to read. Judging by the
>> attitude of Iraqi exiles in my part of the world, the opposition was split.
>> The (Shi'a) al-Khoei Foundation is a few minutes' walk from here. Sheikh
>> Abdul Majid al-Khoei, who was the cleric hacked to death in Najaf, broadly
>> supported the 'intervention'. There were many local Iraqis who did not. (I
>> doubt if all of them were Sunni, either.) And there were several Iraqi
>> commentators who predicted, ante bellum, precisely what has happened: a
>> Sunni insurgency once Saddam was overthrown.
>>
>> I also don't recall anyone stressing 'the cost of the Iraq intervention as
>> against the cost of domestic expenditure', as Hitchens appears to have
>> claimed. Unless I've missed something (I may have done) that's a straw man.
>>
>> As to the Kurds, far from deciding to 'scab and blackleg on the Kurds',
>> there were many who saw 'intervention' as very threatening to the Kurds.
>> Mark, I seem to remember, suggested that very thing on this list. His
>> thinking (I agreed with him) was typical of many who opposed the war even
>> though, in the event, that has (so far) proved to be one of the less
>> problematic parts of this business.
>>
>> CW
>> __________________________________________
>>
>> 'I might have known you'd choose the easy way'
>> (Franz Kline's mother)
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